Sales And Marketing Efforts example essay topic

... in-depth analysis of the customer service capabilities offered by CRMs. Marketing Capabilities of CRMs One of the key reasons that companies invest in CRMs is because they can provide an analysis of customer data that can result in an improvement in process or product. CRMs can achieve an improvement in marketing processes because they help enterprises identify and target their best customers. An important question to consider is, "If 20 percent of customers bring in 80 percent of revenue, why not serve only that 20 percent?" (Collins-White, pg. 1). CRMs can perform customer segmentation, which helps marketers focus their efforts on where they will make the greatest impact.

Before technology-enabled marketing, individuals were usually segmented into groups with others who shared similar demographics or social characteristics. Today, CRMs are able to segment individual clients, perform statistical modeling, and provide profitability calculations in order to detect the relative value of that client to the business. For companies such as professional services firms, one customer can mean substantial revenue opportunities. Discovering these opportunities is one of the goals of effective marketing departments. CRM's can aid in this process by providing lead management and opportunity tracking. Lead management technology analyzes company or proprietary data to determine where an enterprise's greatest opportunities lie.

In addition, consulting firms can employ the technology of CRMs to track requests for proposals. The technology behind CRMs has the capability of keeping track of which RFPs were followed. In addition, an analysis can be conducted on those industries or markets from which the company is receiving RFPs in order to determine those areas that are most profitable and therefore focus on in the future. Not only can CRMs assist in identifying opportunities, they can also track marketing efforts against wins in order to determine how effectively a company's campaigns are.

Many companies blindly market to current and potential customers without really knowing if their efforts are working. An integrated CRM has the functionality to calculate the percentage of those who responded to a marketing campaign compared to those who were targeted in the campaign. This is an invaluable tool in identifying the most appropriate methods and tactics for reaching current and potential clients. A technique that has long been employed by marketers to get a better sense of their customer's needs and preferences is through surveys and questionnaires.

Many CRMs come equipped with tools that can automate and improve upon this process. Survey tools can be used to distribute, compile, manage, and most importantly analyze survey findings. Technologies as common as MS Access and e-mail are capable of distributing, compiling, and managing these findings. But it takes the more advanced functionality found in technologies such as CRMs in order to conduct an in-depth analysis of the survey results. This type of analysis is what makes the survey results meaningful to marketers and business developers. Sales Capabilities of CRMs Sales and marketing efforts often go hand in hand in ensuring revenue and growth within an enterprise.

Hence, much of the information and process improvements, which benefit marketing, can also be used to improve sales efforts as well. Because these two functions are so closely related, its only logical that the technology that enables them is integrated. CRMs provide information, resources, and tools that allow marketing teams to win clients and enable sales teams to generate additional business. These two departments need to form a partnership in order to ensure their efforts are being focused on using CRM tools to optimize sales and marketing efforts. The backbone of CRM sales automation is a centralized customer database that lets customer information collected throughout the enterprise available to the company's sales force.

This provides the sales team with more information to use for prospecting and customer contact. CRMs allow sales people in the field better manage their contacts by creating client profiles as well as records of their historical interactions with the company. Effective and accurate contact management is a vital tool to any client manager. Client managers need to track who their contacts are in a particular company, what their job role is, where they are located, etc.

This information ensures that they are communicating with the right people in the company and keeping key people informed of developments. For example, a client manager may want to send a letter out to all of their contacts within a particular industry. A CRM with proper contact management features will allow a client manager to identify those contacts and create distribution lists or mail merges so the communication is sent to the intended recipients. Client profiles are another essential feature of a CRM. Client managers need the most relevant, accurate and complete data on their clients as possible. A CRM can help make this possible.

A truly integrated CRM is an ideal system for collecting and managing customer data. This means that all interactions with the customer are stored in a centralized database for easy retrieval. To a client manager, this information is invaluable. A CRM can create a customer profile based on data received from web registrations, surveys, as well as historical interactions.

Information from client transactions can be used to determine customer preferences, needs, as well as activities or events the client has attended. This information can be used when making decisions on how to best optimize sales with that client in the future. The Architectural Components of a CRM To understand the structure of a CRM solution one must consider the business model it is designed to support. As mentioned previously, marketing and sales departments are increasingly relying on relationship marketing as a means to more effectively acquire and retain clients.

In short, in order to say competitive, companies must operate based on a customer-centric business model. The Gartner Group predicts there is an 80% probability that by 2001, 70 percent of marketing applications will be entirely redesigned to focus on customers instead of products and redeployed to take advantage of emerging technologies. CRMs are at the forefront of emerging sales and marketing technologies, but there are many tools that contribute to this technologies vast functionality. Word Count: 2020.